Luxury brands are also under pressure. Huawei's Maextro S800 luxury sedan has become China's best-selling car above $100,000 (£74,145), outselling imports like Porsche Panamera and the BMW 7 series combined, which once dominated the Chinese market.
The testers even bought a brand-new model just to make sure this was no coincidence—and it wasn't.
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Chinese EV Brake Pedal Snaps Three Times During Testing
The testers even bought a brand-new model just to make sure this was no coincidence—and it wasn't.
A brake pedal
snapping during an emergency stop is just about one of the worst calamities that can happen on the road, and it appears a luxury EV in China carries that risk right now. Three Maextro V800 vans—built by JAC Group and tech giant Huawei—separately suffered three pedal fractures during 60-to-0-mph braking tests, prompting the manufacturer to begrudgingly commit to fix the component’s design and provide owners free replacements.
These tests made the rounds on
Dongchedi, a car content platform that happens to be owned by ByteDance, which also runs TikTok. The first two failures happened to low-mileage vehicles, and their pedals snapped on their third and fourth runs. The third failure struck a brand new van purchased later, and its pedal collapsed on the second attempt.
Each failure required the testers to immediately engage the Park gear as a makeshift emergency brake, which does eventually stop the vehicle—though, as you can see in the footage, not quickly.
The video below is in Chinese, but it’s not hard to get the gist of what’s going on. The
driver presses hard, something audibly breaks, and the pedal falls all the way to the back of the footwell, dangling.
Huawei's MPV fails safety test: Maextro V800 brake pedal brackets snap in triple failure
Afterwards, the testers identified three potential issues with the component’s design that could explain why this keeps happening, per
CarNewsChina. The brake pedal happens to be long, with a considerable distance between its central pivot point and the end of it, where your foot strikes. It also appears to be insufficiently supported, and material strength may be lacking as well.
While Maextro is apparently promising to install new parts for concerned owners, it’s also taken a somewhat dismissive tone about the severity of the problem, according to
CnEV Post. The
automaker’s position is that these defects were discovered during “non-standard, extreme test conditions,” and that the V800’s braking system exceeds the standards of both China’s transport ministry and the industry. It’s also said that such failures have not been reported on customer vehicles. Don’t reckon that’ll make owners feel much better, though.
Metal Brake pedal resting in plastic housing which snaps if you hit the brake pedal hard.
